Maine is _down_ east of Massachusetts.

[Laurence Horn]

On Aug 18, 2011, at 8:30 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

> At 8/18/2011 02:53 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>> On Aug 18, 2011, at 2:46 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>> 
>> > Everyone's familiar with that one. I've just heard a Bostonian say
>> > that he doesn't like to go to Rhode Island, even to see his
>> > girlfriend, because
>> >
>> > "There's nothing to do, _up_ there."
>> >
>> I haven't heard that one.  Besides heading "down east" (northward)
>> in Maine, there's also the lower Cape (Cape Cod, e.g. Provincetown
>> at the very northernmost tip) vs. the upper Cape, the latter to the
>> south of the former.  But I hadn't come across references to RI as
>> "up" from Boston.
> 
> I haven't heard it either.  But Wilson's speaker is logical -- if
> Maine is down (east) from Massachusetts, then Rhode Island surely is up.
> 
> As for the lower vs. upper Cape, that has always seemed logical to
> me.  The lower Cape is further out from the main body of
> Massachusetts than the upper Cape, just as the lower arm is further
> out from the body than the upper arm.  I don't try to correlate
> north-south with upper-lower.
> 
Here's wikipedia on the topic, with more explanations than you could shake a windblown stick at (scaled maps, winds, body part metaphors)—everything but north and south, which would indeed mispredict in this case:

The terms "Upper" and "Lower" derive from early usage and reliance on scaled maps and charts. When one travelled to the east, one went down the scale (toward zero at Greenwich, England). On the other hand, travel to the west was up the scale. To this day, on nearby Martha's Vineyard, "Up Island" is the western section and "Down Island" is to the east. And in Maine, the eastern portion of the state is called "Down East." Also, prevailing fair weather winds out of the southwest have been used as the basis for the designations, as winds have traditionally been a basis for directional descriptions by European settlers and their descendants in eastern North America. That is, one would be travelling "down [wind]" to the east with a westerly wind at one's back.

The best known colloquial reference, however, is the "arm" shape of the peninsula as it appears on maps and charts, thus making the southern portion of the Cape the "Upper Arm", Orleans the "Elbow," and the north-south portion that is most like an Atlantic barrier island, the "Lower Arm." Some even refer to Provincetown as the "Hand," with its various points (e.g., the current Race Point, Wood End, and Long Point) as fingers.

In the late nineteenth century, as the Cape began drawing more vacationers and artists on retreat, the nautical nomenclature and potential negative connotation of referring to the towns from Orleans to Provincetown as the "Lower Cape," lost favor to the simpler "Outer Cape."

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